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/lit/ - Literature

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22229690 No.22229690 [Reply] [Original]

This shit was awful
Does Acceptance get better?

>> No.22229695

>>22229690
If the first book was awful why would you even want to read the next one?

>> No.22229711

I liked Authority but felt like Acceptance ran out of steam. Authority is like an insane Kafka take on the spy novel and the whole book is dealing with the ludicrous bureaucracy of Southern Reach. It also has some genuinely cool ideas about how weird Area X is and how attempting to place ordinary categorizations, mark boundary lines, and classify things about it was doomed to failure - that the whole of Southern Reach is already in Area X yet none of them noticed.

>> No.22229712

>>22229695
I liked the first book

>> No.22229716

>>22229712
Oh you meant it was "aweful" not "awful"

>> No.22229719

>>22229711
It has neat ideas sure but the "Southern Reach is in Area X" twist was obviously telegraphed very early on from the hypnotic suggestions and the existence of "Central" far outside of the SR. Control as a character is just awful and really annoying to be with for 300 pages. The ending with the biologist drags on for way too long and feels unearned and random.

>> No.22229726

>>22229716
Authority is the 2nd book in the trilogy

>> No.22229728

>>22229726
I didn't ask

>> No.22229746

>>22229728
Okay

>> No.22229759

>>22229719
The 'twist' is not the point but the exploration of all the ways Area X ontologically violates all human attempts to understand it. It's one of the few books that understands Lovecraft formulation of Weird far better than just about everyone else influenced by Lovecraft. And Control is such a great portrait of a snivelling bureaucratic runt that watching him squirm was a pleasure - if you've lived through any military hierarchy or corporate hierarchy you would recognize Controls everywhere. Agree about the ending though.

>> No.22229769

>>22229759
>but the exploration of all the ways Area X ontologically violates all human attempts to understand it
I think this gets a lot less interesting when someone else is aware of this before Control/the reader. At that point it feels less about Area X and more about bureaucracy. It starts to feel a little ridiculous when Central is already so many steps ahead. I understand this is basically what the book is about I just don't find it really interesting with everything else surrounding it.

>> No.22229776

>>22229769
Different strokes for different folks. I think the creeping surreal horror is far better when it's placed in such a banal environment with all the weirdness creeping in from the fringes than in the more openly weird environment of Annihilation though.

>> No.22230590

>>22229690

No, the sequels are total ass.

>> No.22230605
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22230605

For some reason I enjoyed Annihilation, both film and book. It's cool how the strangeness of the Shimmer is maintained, there's never a big reveal that tells you what it's all about. Some kind of alien technology? But the aliens are so strange that it's more of a metaphysical encounter?

OTOH I can sense the onions behind it all. Like college put some pomo gobbledygook in this guy's head and the moral of the story is trannies somehow.